Born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, Becker earned in MA (1953) and PhD (1955) from the University of Chicago, where he studied with the economist Milton Friedman, and began teaching as an assistant professor in 1954, leaving Chicago in 1957 for Columbia University, where he conducted research at the National Bureau for Economic Research, and returning to Chicago in 1970, where he would spend the rest of his career.

Becker, who held a joint appointment as University Professor in the the Departments of Economics and Sociology, remained active well into his eighties, where his acute stance on the role of human capital in labor economics, free-market orientation, and commentator on the economic dimensions of social phenomena helped earn his reputation as “an original, prolific, and sometimes provocative” scholar.

In 1992, Becker won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences “for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including non-market behavior.” In 2007, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. This same year, he was among the founding Board of Editors for the Journal of Human Capital.

Modern economics too often seems to devolve into statistics and mathematical formulas, which is only one of the reasons the world will miss Gary Becker, who died on Saturday at age 83. The Nobel laureate always put the study of humanity first and foremost, applying the principles of his discipline to human capital and how it can best be utilized for the common good.

“He just pushed economics in so many different directions,” said [Kevin] Murphy, who collaborated with Mr. Becker in research on human capital, education, addiction and the economics of the family. “He believed that economics was helpful to understanding and improving people’s lives and that’s how he did his research and that’s how he taught.”

“His commitment to his family and his commitment to economics were the two biggest things in his life and he liked it that way,” Murphy said. “He really loved economics and he loved the University of Chicago and he loved even more the combination of those two things.”